Prospects for Conservation research abroad

Prospects for Conservation research abroad

Dr.T.P.Sethumadhavan

Biodiversity is the key in maintaining life. Rapidly growing human population place extraordinary pressures on ecosystems like large-scale environmental destruction, habitat conservation, habitat fragmentation and pollution. This lead to emergence of conservation biology, an assemblage of scientific disciplines that are focused on sustaining biodiversity through co-operative synthesis of ideas, information and approaches. Conservation biology is the emerging branch of biology having immense research and career potential in the world. Recently conservation of flora and fauna has been picking up momentum in the country.


Developed countries are giving more importance to research on Conservation biology. There is immense potential for biology students to do conservation research abroad. Postgraduates in Zoology and Botany can do MS and PhD from USA and UK. They can start preparing for overseas education during their postgraduate study period itself. Students are required to complete TOEFL and GRE for getting admission in American universities. They can also join for one year MS programme from UK after completing IELTS with a score of minimum 6.5. ‘Extinction is forever. But for endangered, we can do some thing’ is the motto of some of the American universities having conservation research projects.


The concept of genome resource banks is a not new. Already biomaterials from crops and livestock are stored systematically, a development driven largely by economics and by the desire to ensure secure food sources. Large scale organized repositories of germplasm are more common for plants than for animals, since it is easier to store plant than animal germ plasm. Livestock sector has been benefited from large-scale sperm and embryo cryo preservation for the purpose of improving meat and milk production. Moreover a few programmmes bank biomaterials from animal models used in biomedical research to protect the long-term availability of standard genotypes of mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, cats and dogs ensuring that researchers are working with uniform animal models which will give repeatable results.

Transgenic technology i.e., the ability to incorporate novel genes in to injected embryos has also resulted in the production of thousands of new animal models in the world. Although this technology has hastened research opportunities, the byproduct is a proliferation of animal colonies that require expensive housing and care. Cryo preservation of sperm and embryos are potentially valuable in the future.

The usefulness of banked germ plasm and embryos from humans, livestock and laboratory animals depends on assisted reproduction procedures like artificial insemination, embryo transfer and invitro fertilization. These procedures are sometimes enhanced by other techniques, such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in which an individual sperm cell is microinjected into an oocyte to create an embryo. Because a single semen sample often contains millions of sperm, this sample has almost unlimited fertilization potential.